I've been doing some reading about the brain.
You might find this informative:
Seeking to understand the neurological basis for religious experience, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili performed a simple experiment. Finding a group of eight volunteers who were Zen Buddhists, they asked them to meditate in the peace and silence of a darkened room. These Buddhists had claimed that, through meditation, they could reach a state called satori, in which they experienced a sense of transcendent bliss along with a feeling of timelessness and infinity, as if they were a deeply interwoven part of all of reality. Newberg and D'Aquili wanted to find out what was going on in their minds when such a thing happened.
When the meditating volunteers reached the apex of this state, they tugged on a string, which was Newberg and D'Aquili's cue to inject a radioactive tracer into their blood through an IV line. This tracer travels to the brain and becomes bound to the neurons that were most active, creating a "snapshot" of brain activity at that particular moment that could later be imaged through a technique called SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography).
The imaging was done. Not surprisingly, brain regions responsible for concentration were highly active; but there was one other consistent result that stood out like a red flag. In all eight subjects, a particular region of the brain, the superior parietal lobe, showed a sharp and dramatic reduction in activity.
The role of this brain region was already known. As discussed in Part 1 of this essay, the superior parietal lobe is the brain's "where" system. Its job is to orient the individual in three-dimensional space and help a person move through the external world, and as part of this task, it must draw a clear distinction between "self" and "not-self". For this reason, Newberg and D'Aquili call it the "orientation association area", or OAA for short. In all eight Tibetan Buddhists, the OAA had been blocked out by their deep meditative state, deprived of the sensory information it needs to build a coherent picture of the world.
What would be the result of such a neural state? Without the OAA, the brain is unable to perceive the physical limits of the self - unable to tell where the body ends and where the world begins. (One of the meditators who took part in the study described the experience as feeling "like a loss of boundary" (Holmes 2001, p. 26)). And "[i]n that case, the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real" (Newberg and D'Aquili 2001, p. 6).
Food for thought.
Any comment?
